One of the things I’m curious about is WHITE RAGE APOLOGETICS…

Or, the cultural work that is done in order to justify away working-class white resentment…

Examples like

• David Brooks recently blaming higher-ed & deindustrialization…
• Bernie Sanders, from another vantage, claiming that the Democratic party doesn’t support working people and has driven working-class whites into Trump’s hands
• or Obama famously saying:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

• James Baldwin in “Nothing Personal” making the (positively awful) claim that “The poor white was enslaved almost from the instant he arrived on these shores, and he is still enslaved by a brutal and cynical oligarchy.”

In other words, this persistent cultural tendency to suggest that white resentment is a RATIONAL psychological response to objectively difficult socio-economic conditions…

I think it is a legitimately interesting question, Why is white affect so resentful, why are whites so prone to rage and bitterness? But this approach—blaming it on a legit grievance—seems to me not to really address the pathological and fascist dimensions of white bitterness…

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